O'Leary,
Daniel Florence [Florencio] (c.1802-1854), army officer in the South American Wars of Independence, was born in Cork
City at the turn of the nineteenth century to a relatively
prosperous merchant family. His paternal grandfather, Florence
O’Leary, of Dunmanway in West Cork, had
moved to the southern city to become a grocer and butter
merchant. The business was inherited by his two sons Daniel and
Jeremiah, who owned it in partnership. Jeremiah, a member of the
influential Cork Committee of Merchants, married Catherine
Burke, who hailed from a family involved in tailoring and the
licensed victualling trade in Cork City. The couple had ten
children in all, few of whom survived to adulthood. Daniel
Florence was their eighth child. His elder brother became a
medical doctor in Killarney, County Kerry and his sister
Catherine was a milliner in Cork.

In 1815, as the Napoleonic Wars in Europe finally
drew to a close, the merchants of Cork, who had grown wealthy through provisioning the
British Navy and the West Indian trade, were faced with
disaster. Jeremiah O’Leary’s business went bankrupt and two
years later his son, Daniel Florence, aged only sixteen, decided
to join the army. He was recruited as Second Lieutenant by the
British Legion in London for the
1st or 2nd Division of the Venezuelan Red
Hussars under Colonel Henry Wilson. In December of that year,
the cavalry regiment sailed from Portsmouth, England on the
corvette Prince.

In February 1818 they disembarked at St. Georges, Granada, and
two months later arrived at Angostura, present-day Ciudad
Bolívar. Shortly after arrival, Wilson was sent back to England
on suspicion of political intrigue. O’Leary busied himself with
studying the Spanish language and subsequently travelled to
Guyana
to join the troops being organised there by Simón Bolívar,
recognised as the Liberator of northern South America. He was
presented to General Carlos Soublette, future President of
Venezuela and father-in-law of Daniel Florence O’Leary, and was
chosen for the Dragoon Squadron of the Guard of Honour under the
command of General José Antonio Anzoátegui. O’Leary had a
personal audience with Simón Bolívar at this time.

By early 1819 on an inspection of the troops by Bolívar, O’Leary had been
promoted to the rank of First Adjutant of the Dragoons. He
received a facial injury from a sabre wound in July 1819 at the
battle of Pantano de Vargas, resulting in false reports of his
death in the Cork
newspapers. From his arrival in South America, O’Leary
distinguished himself in numerous battles and rose through the
ranks of the army to become aide-de-camp to Anzoátegui. In
September 1819 Bolívar authorised O’Leary’s membership of the
order of Liberators and named him one of his own personal
aides-de-camp. He accompanied the Liberator to sign a peace
treaty in favour of the new state of Venezuela in Trujillo and
sealed the country’s independence at Carabobo. O’Leary was named
Colonel in 1827 and a year later he married Soledad Soublette.
He was finally appointed Brigadier General by Bolívar in 1830.

O’Leary had a round beardless face, a high forehead, brown hair, sparse
sideburns and bright attentive eyes. He was literate and
educated, though no records survive as to where he received this
education. He had a lively interest in history, science, the
natural world and politics, understanding the import of the
events in which he was involved in South America,
and conserving records and papers. He was also an adept
horseman.

Subsequent to the death of Simón Bolívar, Daniel Florence O’Leary and his
wife Soledad Soublette travelled to Kingston,
Jamaica, where the General attempted to set himself up as a
merchant and the couple had the first of their nine children. In
1833 he was advised by General Soublette to return to Venezuela.

O’Leary was sent by the Government of Venezuela to Europe in 1834
as secretary to the Plenipotentiary General Montilla. While on
that side of the Atlantic, General O’Leary visited Cork, though
his parents had already passed away. He met with his only
surviving sibling Catherine. He spent almost six years as a
diplomat in London,
Paris, Madrid and the Vatican.

In 1841 the Corkman was appointed British Consul at Caracas and
later at Puerto Cabello. Two and a half years later he was
appointed British chargé d’affaires and consul-general at
Bogotá, Colombia. O’Leary settled in Bogotá with his family on
the ranch ‘El Chocho’ on the savannah. For health reasons
O’Leary again travelled to Europe in 1852 to visit consultants and receive treatment in Paris, Rome and
Malvern, Worcestershire. Back in Cork, he presented his
collection of minerals, plants and birds from South America to Queen’s College Cork, now University College Cork.

Daniel Florence O’Leary arrived back in Bogotá in December 1853. Just two
months later he died of apoplexy caused by a brain haemorrhage
early on the morning of 24 February
1854. Some twenty-eight years later his remains were removed to
the National Pantheon in Caracas, Venezuela, close to the final
resting place of Simón Bolívar.

O’Leary’s son, Simón Bolívar O’Leary collated and edited his father’s
extensive manuscript collection on the South American wars of
independence in the 32-volume Memorias del General
O’Leary,
a crucial source in the study of the era. Daniel Florence
O’Leary’s papers were donated by the family to the ‘Archivo del
Libertador’ (Liberator’s Archive) in Caracas, Venezuela.